_The Rosary_ was his favourite novel, as it was mine. At each fresh reading we were moved to the edge, if not over the edge, of tears. It is, in the author’s words, the story of a beautiful woman in a plain shell. No man has ever seen below that surface. But one day she sings “The Rosary” at a concert: the veil is torn aside, and Garth Dalmain, the famous painter, perceives her spiritual worth. But because she fears that he will tire of her, she will not marry him, and in a scene of sustained pathos, during which the name of the Deity is never long absent from her lips, she tells him that their paths must separate. But “love never faileth.” Garth is providentially blinded in a shooting accident, and his lover returns to him as a nurse. Then the drama opens. She writes him letters, which in the position of nurse and secretary she reads to him, and as his nurse she makes him gradually appreciate the intensity of his need for the woman who has refused him. And, when the last barrier has gone, the nurse reveals herself as the lover by striking triumphantly the solemn chords of “The hours I spent with thee, dear heart.” Prose narrative could, we felt, attain to no higher level of emotion, and at the end of the day, between lock up and hall, among mauve cushions we would sit and talk of the secret springs, the hidden splendours of life, of how we, too, within a plain shell were beautiful. It passed, of course, that worship that was almost idolatry. It passed in the September of 1913, when a copy of _Carnival_ was bought at a railway bookstall at the close of a summer holiday. That autumn we laid our mantle of sentiment before the tripping feet of Jenny, and when in early summer a copy of _Poems and Ballads_ found its way into the school-house studies, it was the departed glory of Proserpine that we declaimed. We passed from one allegiance to another, as we passed from one size in collars to another. We were growing up. But it is no part of my intention here, in this chapter, to attempt to trace the growth, the development, or the decay, as you may please to call it, of a literary taste. I am concerned solely with this fact: that ten years ago I held Florence Barclay to be the greatest living novelist, that in her work I found those characteristics, those qualities that to-day I find in the stories of Turgenev; that, as Turgenev moves me in 1923, so Mrs Barclay moved me in the summer of 1912. And this fact I find to be in the highest degree disquieting. There are attached to it a very large number of uncomfortable corollaries.